A look at GNOME Census

GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC

While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors

Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.

A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

Canonical has always been below when it comes to contributions. They develop softwares downstream which gets pushed upstream pretty late. In most of the surveys, the position of Canonical is always pretty below in the list.

Dunno what new does this GNOME study is trying to tell us? Everyone knows Canonical is below and will always be going to be below.

Anyway this list is for all time contributions, so Canonical can never ever catch up. RedHat has been contributing to GNOME even before Canonical existed.
Giving a stats table for last 2-3 years would throw more light.